We Ask 10 Questions For High-End
Audio ManufacturersFeaturing John Franks, Founder, Owner and
chief designer at Chord ElectronicsEnjoy the Music.com's 25th
Anniversary brings you a new special feature!

A. I was just twelve years old; we had very good but
unfortunately highly strung, rather neurotic, prickly and even, at first,
spiteful middle-aged tight-bun-headed music teacher. The whole class would
enjoy sending her into apoplexy through the application of liberal amounts of
mucking about and sullen indifference; she must have truly hated her job and all
of us schoolboys.

To pacify the class on one particularly hot, boring and sultry
afternoon, she had just about had enough and had given up as we slumped
half-asleep across our school desks. She put on a piece of Debussy's
music (after she had explained it a little) I think it was Daphne and Chloe or
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

In our adolescent clock-watching revelry, listening to this
impressionist masterpiece, something just snapped into place: I suddenly 'got' what it was all about. Strangely, this affected several of us in the
class who later delighted the old teacher by actually becoming interested and
wanting to hear other similar pieces then more pieces by other composers.
Eventually, we all got to enjoy her classes.

Q. How did you first get introduced to high-fidelity audio
gear?

A. I was given an electronics kit made by Phillips when I was
nine and I'd soon mastered how to make some simple circuits. But after a
while, I started to make other circuits. I'd found a small, old shop in town
that fixed TVs and sold components, so I'd save my pocket money and get on the
bus into town to go and buy bits and put them together with varying amounts of
success and failure. I learned how to solder with an iron the size of a pair of
hair curlers and I made crystal radios and Superhet radios and small amplifiers.

Q. What is your favorite piece of vintage hi-fi, and why?

A. As a teenager, behind my house, there was a wooded area and
gentle hills with huge green fields and a disused old chalk quarry that people
would dump old radios into. None of them worked. I'd rob them of parts to make
other stuff, but one time I'd found and old short-wave radio and took it home
and got it going. It had a Bakelite moulded case and it polished up beautifully.
I'd listen to stations from all over the world at night.

Q. When did you decide to start a high-end audio company?

A. In my early twenties, I was working as an avionics engineer
and I'd seen and worked on some truly wonderfully designed and made
electronics that were tens of years in advance of normal commercial electronics,
so I knew what was possible. At that time, I made amplifiers for my friend's disco and
we'd go around all the local nightspots. I attended a
hi-fi show and was intrigued by the huge amplifiers I'd seen there, but
thought perhaps I could use my advance avionics knowledge to do better. But by
then, my career took off and soon I'd got married and left my interests behind
and had become a company director of Raytheon and AT&T, however, I'd not
totally forgotten my love of putting stuff together and I fished out a design
idea I had that used some avionics design knowledge I had. Usually, I'd mess
around on a rainy afternoon until one day, I felt I really had something and
decided I'd like to try to build and sell it.

Q. What, and when, was your company's first product?

A. It was 1989 and I was working for another company and my
fellow directors said they'd like to build my design, which they did. I'd
assumed that because I had all this advanced technical knowledge, I could make
an amplifier just as good and as powerful, but an eighth the size of the huge
American amplifiers on the market at the time. Big mistake! No-one would believe
it could compare, though actually it was better, but no one bought it. The unit
was called the SPM 900 amplifier. So, I redesigned the case to make the
amp about eight times larger and after gaining a few nice reviews for the
imaginatively newly named SPM 1200 we never looked back once the unit was
selling well. I gave up my high-powered industrial career and started
Chord Electronics in my garage.

Q. What challenges did you face during those early years?

A. Lack of funding, lack of credibility, lack of staff, lack of
everything to run a business, really, but I was ecstatically happy just building
a few amplifiers and going out selling them. I got a break when The BBC came
knocking. They had a studio problem and had heard about the advanced amps I was
making. They liked the sample I supplied and soon I had a contract to supply
them and the credibility that came with it.

Q. How have your products evolved over the years?

A. We've always been a highly technical company, pushing at the
known boundaries of technological advancements, throughout the whole period we
have been in business. As new devices become available, we'd use them to make
constant and relentless advancements.

Q. What is your company's most popular
product(s)?

A. In 2013 we developed a product for the mobile and headphone
market, Hugo. It and subsequent mobile products, have been a great success and
have grown the business by a thousand percent in about two years.

Q. What is your next planned product offering and
its'
features?

A. We have five ranges of products. We will be bringing out more
products in those ranges to enhance them all. Though, I'm sure you will
understand that I can't go into individual products details, save to say they
follow the philosophy of pushing the known technology of today to its limits.

Q. What advancements do you speculate high-end audio will offer
ten years from now?

A.I
think loudspeaker coils will become far smaller and lighter allowing
high-quality loudspeakers to evolve beyond all recognition. Gallium nitride
power devices will allow for limitless power in tiny packages, powered by
solid-state batteries with at least four times the power of current-generation,
bulky Lithium-ion types.